Francis Bacon’s portrait of his first partner Peter Lacy is somehow simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The monumental portrait dating from 1962 was unknown to the public for a long time. Shortly after it was painted, Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni acquired the work and it remained in private hands for decades. This is a key work, created at a turning point in Bacon’s oeuvre. Markus Rath embeds the painting into Bacon’s visual world for the first time. The English painter reveals a biographical figuration in the portrait, concentrating his compositional arrangement on the stage-like interior and forcing a contrast between the two-dimensional ground and the colour-saturated figure – these are pioneering approaches to composition that shaped his late work decisively.

Markus Rath, University of Trier.